Reuben Levy's commentary on the latest news and events in fintech.

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05/11/15 Update: FinTech Market Map v2.0

05/11/15 UPDATE: As a result of all the great feedback — over 50 comments and suggestions — the map is now 575+ names. This version includes a node for “Capital Markets” software, which I would define as companies that provide technology to institutions (asset managers, pension funds, banks, broker-dealers and other institutional investors) to analyze, access and participate in institutional financial markets. You’ll also find some Capital Markets firms in broader categories such as “Data and Analytics”, “Wealth Management”, and “API / Connectivity” because in many cases these companies serve both institutional and retail / consumer markets. As always, feedback is very welcome!

Click here for full live map. I’ve been collecting lists of interesting financial technology startups for a while, but mostly they are lost in emails, bookmarks, Evernote and yellow stickies. So a few weeks ago I decided to get organized and start putting together a sector map of “fintech”.

It’s a good time to be doing this

Last year fintech firms raised $5.3Bn from VCs, 2x the amount in 2013. Commentators love to debate which city — New York, London or San Francisco — will be the “capital” for fintech. Bottom line is that the funds are flowing.

We’ve now had two of the first big fintech IPOs — Lending Club and OnDeck.

Traditional financial institutions are taking notice and starting to react. Many have (re)started venture funds or labs to make strategic investments. Others have chosen to partner (RBS referring clients to Funding Circle, Jefferies securitizing loans CircleBack, etc). Many more will acquire.

This technology makes our lives better. In the future it will cost less and take less time to make a payment, transfer funds, buy foreign currency or obtain a loan.

So what is FinTech

People use the term “fintech” very differently. Historically it was used to describe technology applied to the middle or back office of banks. Others use it to refer to the innovation that is disrupting traditional financial institutions. I prefer a broad definition:

“Fintech is technology that either enables or delivers financial services.”

This is deliberately broad because I think of fintech as everything from enabling technology (e.g. crm tools for traditional wealth advisors) to the service itself (e.g. robo advisors). No doubt this definition is not perfect — storage and infrastructure software enable financial services, but that would stretch the concept.

Developing a taxonomy for the categories within fintech is challenging. I won’t claim that this map is perfect, and I hope it will evolve and improve over time. This map is certainly incomplete. I’ve had to start somewhere, so I included the most notable (in a very subjective way) companies in fintech today.

For investors, I hope this map starts to paint a picture of significant themes, spaces that are crowded, and emerging opportunities.

For entrepreneurs, I hope this map provides a guide to the areas of blue ocean or white space, as well as the technologies that could be combined to deliver a new innovative solution.

Hi Reuben, great work on mapping FinTech. We are focused on on-demand cloud-based market data APIs, see Barchart OnDemand (www.barchartondemand.com). Your post on capital markets is also timely, we just announced an event in Chicago to specifically focus on FinTech in financial markets and trading, check out http://www.FinTechChicago.com. FinTEx Chicago a new member association is also taking shape in Chicago, like many other cities…might be a nice addition to add a group on the map for this category of clusters/associations.

Great work. congrats. May I introduce you SlimPay, the first pan-european payment platform dedicated to recurring payments (subscription payments and repeat order payments). We’ve operated more than €2.5bn of payments in 2014. The underlying payment tech we operate are of course Cards payments but more and more paperless direct-debits and mobile payments. We plan to continue our growth by x2/x3 for the next 3 years. SlimPay is also an European Payment Institution, regulated by EBA (European Banking Authority) and acts as the merchant bank.

Hello Mr Levy
Thanks for all the work you put into this – excellent resource

We are a fundamental valuation site focused on retail investors – Full suite of tools including Query, Backtesting, Forecasting, Collaboration and Valuationhttp://www.stockcalc.com Can provide a demo account if you like (username, password)
Sincerely
Brian

Hello Mr Levy
Thanks for all the work you put into this – excellent resource

We are a fundamental valuation site focused on retail investors – Full suite of tools including Query, Backtesting, Forecasting, Collaboration and Valuationhttp://www.stockcalc.com Can provide a demo account if you like (username, password)
Sincerely
Brian

Reuben, great overview, very helpful. How about including http://www.wikifolio.com in the community investing section. We operate social trading (or low-cost active alpha if you like); already have more than 300 million EUR invested over the last 2.5 years – and in the process of rolling out beyond Germany&Austria. Greetings from Vienna, Stefan, CCO wikifolio.com

At the risk of tmi, a lot of notes below:
– Acorns and WiseBanyan under wealth mgmt if not ther eyet
– Can add Nvestly, Openfolio, Tipdoff. Might make sense to add Vetr and Investify, too.
– SigFig also a wealth mgmt tool now (they pivoted slightly)
– Robinhood under discount brokerage?
– Is Coinbase on there?
– RealtyShares and RealCrowd under real estate
– Could add Aspiration to Illiquid (would this be called “alternatives”?)
– Yodelee is spelled Yodlee.

Also, is there any way to make the defunct companies still show up, but in a different color, perhaps? Stockr and Spout are no longer

Hi Reuben! I am the founder of Zercatto.com and would like to thank you for including us on the list! Super helpful and interesting by the way! Keep up the great work! Will love to see how it builds up!

Hello Reuben, great map! Thanks a lot for that. I am working for Kantox and wanted to point out the fact that we are also making payments on behalf of our customers as this is a real selling point: we make supplier payments for free.

I really struggled with this — FX “transactions” are really just exchange of one currency for another. They necessarily involved settlement, so there are companies like Kantox that have a value prop that includes both exchange and transfer. I don’t know… if you had to pick one, what would you pick?

Hi Reuben, great work! My name is Michael Chojnacki and I am the co-founder of Closir, an fintech startup in London focused on Investor Relations. We are working on connecting listed company’s IR teams to global institutional investors. Our focus now is Emerging Markets. I would be really glad if you add us on to the next update of your map. We would probably fit in your Investment Community branch best. Thanks mate . Michael @mikechoj

Great work. congrats. May I introduce you SlimPay, the first pan-european payment platform dedicated
to recurring payments (subscription payments and repeat order payments). Should be under “payment platform”.

Hi Reuben, this has been massively helpful for me as. Thank you for putting together the list!

I know that someone else has already asked about exporting the list to PDF, which I appreciate would be difficult due to the sheer scale of the map, but what about a list on excel or similar? Is that something you have already put together?

I am only picking this up now via Linkedin. This is very interesting take on the market. I imagine this will keep growing as will the categories and sub-categories. May I as that you please take a look at http://www.datactics.com ?

Datactics is a provider of software in the areas of data quality and matching. Recently we have been doing a lot of work with getting data in good shape for financial regulations and standards.

Impressive List and effort. At the moment the Data & Analytics head does not have any sub-categories which makes all the players appear as competitors. It would be great if we can add sub-categories like Data Cleansing & Transformation, Data Quality, Trade & Market Analytics, Visualizations & Charting etc

Also can i request you to look at http://pellustro.com which is essentially a cloud based benchmarking analytics platform for enterprise data initiatives within financial services.

Hi Reuben,
Kuarix is a foreign exchange services provider for companies and large individual transaction needs. The Kuarix platform is built upon cutting-edge financial technology to deliver an all-encompassing foreign exchange management service.
Can we add it on your map.
Thank You.

Hey there Reuben, we appreciate your effort on this. It may just be the most comprehensive map created!

We couldn’t help but notice that SizeUp, a fintech company out of San Francisco, was not included. Sizeup helps financial institutions better serve their small business customers by providing high-quality business intelligence. SizeUp helps small businesses make better decisions through big data and as a result of SizeUp’s disruptive model it has become a popular Fintech company winning awards, being profiled in the media, and being invited to present at conferences around the world. We are even being used but the White House and Small Business Administration as a solution to boost our economy.